high concept

If you got together a big private party full of Shell Oil Company VIPs in a posh location like the Seattle Space Needle to celebrate the impending start to their new Arctic drilling project off the coast of Alaska, and they decided to mark the occasion by building a scale replica of the real life oil rig going to the Arctic and this oil rig was made by the same people who built the Deepwater Horizon rig and this scale model rig was designed to neatly dispense alcohol for party guests, what do you think must inevitably occur with all that symbolic setup sitting around tempting fate? Occupy Seattle activist Logan Price was able to sneak in there and find out: “It all started with a malfunction…. of the event’s centerpiece, a scale model of the Kulluk, one of the rigs heading up north, which was sitting in a basin of liquor (rum and coke?) next to an ice sculpture in the shape of an iceberg…” Oh dear. We like where this is going. **UPDATE: Your Wonkette editor is a terrible, gullible person and the story is apparently a sad fake and we are ashamed. Oh well.**

Without further delay, here are the guests of the Shell oil party acting out their own adaptation of the horror of an exploding oil rig:

I guess the photo-op was meant to be a symbolic tapping of the Arctic. There was a ridiculous three-foot-high scale model of their Arctic drilling rig, the Kulluk, and the mini-rig had a tap to pump liquor for the guests.

The guest of honor was an elderly Japanese man introduced as the original Chief Engineer of the Kulluk rig who used to work at Mitsui back in the ’80s. But when the man went to turn on the ‘rig,’ the liquor went everywhere – and the first to be hit was another elderly guest, the widow of the man who’d actually designed the Kulluk back in the 1980s.

The guy in charge kept asking the old engineer to fix it but he obviously had no idea how to turn it off. Shell’s PR people got REALLY worked up, and the designer’s widow started yelling. At this point the guy who was presenting the new ad campaign told me to turn off my camera and got pretty aggressive.

…a Shell spokesman said, “I can confirm that this was not a Shell event.” Shell’s name does not appear in the video, but the company’s logo is visible on the model oil rig.

However, Logan Price, the activist who uploaded the video to YouTube insists that it is real and un-staged, and that the event, called “New Frontiers: A Celebration of Seattle’s Energy Leaders” was held by PR firm Wainwright & Shore.

LeAnne Sanville, a spokeswoman for Wainwright & Shore confirmed that the firm did in fact host the event in the form of an official statement from the firm’s communications manager. However, she would not comment on whether anyone from Shell was present.

Too expensive, Costco just privatized liquor sales in WA and the prices went up 27%.

Biel_ze_Bubba

Needed to burst into flames, for best effect.

GortRay

Smithers! Release the hounds!

OneYieldRegular

Okay, so it's a hoax, but can we still build this thing to dispense liquor for Barb's big beach party in La Jolla?

rickmaci

So I am sure they tried to throw a plastic boom around the spill and doused the room with Corexit 9500 dispersant because that is all these asshats know how do with a spill. Hope they weren't having fish for lunch.

edgydrifter

If this were real, everyone standing within five feet of the rig would have been killed by scalding rum, the Mariners would have had to cancel their season and Shell's CEO would have received a $3.8 million dollar bonus.

nounverb911

If the Mariners cancel their season would anyone notice?

flamingpdog

Who?

edgydrifter

ICHIRO LIBEL!!

nounverb911

There might not be an "I" in team, but there certainly are 2 in Ichiro.

TribecaMike

"Relax granny, gin is our friend!"

SayItWithWookies

This is great news — now Shell has learned their lesson about preparedness and safety in such a delicate environment, and since they're tuned in to the consequences of carelessness, you can bet it'll never happen in the field. Private enterprise has saved us again!

flamingpdog

OK, who gets to administer the spanking of Kirsten Boyd Johnson?

KBoydJohnson

Goody!

Doktor StrangeZoom

That oil rig did look a little like the grail beacon from Castle Anthrax…

I read it this morning on the Seattle Times site and vaguely thought "huh, that's weird, people still go to the Space Needle?"

fitley

It was probably wrong for me to laugh as much as I did at the elderly lady squealing as she got Dana Loesched by that rig.

barto

Point is, it COULD happen. In fact, it's likely.

Billmatic

i know it hurts us deep down in our bleeding hearts but it's generally a good rule of thumb to assume anything labeled "occupy" is completely untrustworthy, manipulative, anarchist nonsense.

calliecallie

Barto's right. In fact it probably will happen. Remember how many months it took them to stop that spill in the Gulf? In warm weather, with so much equipment fairly close by to come to the rescue? How long you think it will take to stop a spill in the Arctic in, say, February? Asshats. I wish this video was real.

comrad_darkness

The guy who says to turn off the camera gets my emmy nomination. If I had one, that is.